The imperfect crime

For savagely taking a neighbor's life, mother and son will spend theirs in prison

It was as blaring as it was brutal; pretty much the opposite of the perfect crime.

The only thing this murderous pair didn’t get accomplished was constructing neon signs pointing to them.

Perhaps that’s why mother-and-son hit squad Rebecca Bowers Sears, 44, and Christopher Sean Bowers, 23, have gone away so quietly and reliably: for life without parole, after pleading guilty Friday to the 2009 beating death of their Grovetown neighbor, Laverne “Kay” Parsons.

There was nothing subtle about the motive or modus operandi of this sorry set of sociopaths. She wanted a romantic rival out of the way; sonny took care of it, in a particularly rabid way: Ms. Parsons was repeatedly clubbed with a baseball bat and claw hammer.

To throw investigators off the scent, the two later staged a threatened shooting of Sears, the mother – except that the boy actually ended up shooting his mother in the leg.

This case will never make any of the “whodunit” shows on television. But neither will it be forgotten anytime soon in these parts. You don’t see such raw savagery much.

“It is, quite frankly, one of the grisliest murders I have ever seen,” says District Attorney Ashley Wright. “She’d been beaten very severely. She’d been struck numerous times.”

The potential punishment this duo faced was every bit as subtle as their barbarity: death. To avoid that fate – to which they had already consigned their neighbor, and in a much less civilized way – they took the easier way out.

Thank goodness this state’s laws, providing for the ultimate penalty, inspired this plea. It achieved what it needed to – a lifetime of punishment – and without having to pick open the survivors’ wounds during what surely would’ve been a torturous trial.

We’ve seen enough of this pair and their bloodthirsty ruthlessness for several lifetimes.

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Well, actually we will all be contributing to their upkeep for many years. To bad we don't have a system where the inmates have to grow their own crops, raise their own animals for meat, and get their medical care from doctors who are also incarcerated.